LAUSR

literature and zoological writings relied on what she terms “chimeric description,” a string oftentimes of similes used to depict new living forms. In The Tempest, Shakespeare not only “reveals the combinative imagination at work,” but also forces us, as readers and playgoers, to reenact this process, particularly as we mentally negotiate the many creaturely descriptions characters ascribe to Caliban (181). Roychoudhury attends to the metatheatricality of several isolated moments, arguing, in her epilogue, that Midsummer’s rude mechanicals underscore the imaginative work dramatic productions necessitate. A more sustained engagement with the image-making minds of audiences could, however, offer the field of performance studies a fruitful investigation into the phenomenological experience of playgoing during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Nevertheless, Phantasmatic Shakespeare is an exciting addition to scholarship on early modern cognition and embodiment and a timely contribution to the fields of cognitive literary studies, history of consciousness, and phenomenology.